Now I want to read the novel again.
Marginally related but today was having a meeting with someone who is notorious for not being plugged in. I wish I had a recording of it because she literally went “oh sh-” mid sentence and then was booted as her computer shut down. Impeccable timing.
Heh, that’s happened a lot since our org updated to Win11. Updates in the middle of the day (despite IT assuring us those only install after hours 🙄) and people just randomly drop from meetings as their PCs reboot. Project manager almost called shenanigans on that until it happened to her mid-meeting.
Today (well, yesterday now), mine was just “Preparing to hibernate due to low battery” and I was like “wait, what?!” and was frantically making sure everything got saved (this old workhorse doesn’t always want to resume from hibernate). Turns out I had the cord plugged into the laptop but didn’t plug it into the outlet
… Im now invested in what happens next
What were they working on?
What happens over the next 20 seconds?
It’s from the Jurassic Park novel. Spoiler: It kinda goes downhill from there (both the situation and the franchise).
The latest one wasn’t bad, just same story again, nothing original except more water and dumb choices.
It felt very lifeless, they tried to create interesting background stories for the main characters, but it felt super forced and it was completely irrelevant to the rest of the movie. Also they lazily copied the famous kitchen scene in JP1
I don’t know the last time I cared so little about the characters in a film. There were a couple of solid scenes but they couldn’t save it. I was genuinely happy when it was finally over.
Couldn’t agree more!
Also they lazily copied …
In film school, that’s called an homage. /s
I’ve always called it Quentin Tarantino’s entire fucking career.
Yes, but it was entertaining. Just nothing original, seen it all before inside and outside Jurassic Park movies.
They get eaten by velociraptors.
In context, this makes sense.
The book is even better than the movie, don’t rob yourself of a great time.
The load bearing laptop dies and crashes the entire internet and everyone dies. The end.
I loved Crichton, but goddamned does he over explain tech.
The log was a record of the system over the last few hours.
If readers may not be familiar, he could help them infer that from character actions or dialog.
“Well Wu? What’s the log say the system’s been doing over the last few hours?”, said Arnold
Congo was maybe the worst for techsplaining. Still a great novel!
I love the movie, but my spouse talked me into reading the book and it’s an absolute masterpiece. Michael Crichton is to science what Steven king is to scary.
The tongue scene was easily the worst thing I’ve ever read.
This was the first Crichton novel I read, and it got me into his other works. Most of them have the common theme of:
- There’s a secret science place where science happens
- At event causes people not normally associated with the secret science place to have to go to the secret science place
- The secret science at the secret science place goes horribly wrong
- The secret science place blows up in the end
That formula doesn’t really detract from any of his books, but I did laugh when I had read enough of his catalog to see the pattern.
Not to nitpick, but it’s only been a single page and I already feel like the author has over used the word “said”, is all the dialogue this bad?
Not really. There’s just a lot of characters in that scene (Muldoon, Hammond, Wu, Arnold, and Gennaro) all with dialog.
This is a structure even more common than just one author. It needs a name like the hero’s journey has. Heck, your summary works for Alien Ressurection!
I nominate “Science goes wrong”
I can’t dive into tvtropes right now, but I’ve got dollar on someone having coined a term already.
One term is “techno-thriller”. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-thriller
That is more of an action vibe than a horror vibe though.
or “science goes BOOOM”?
Have you ever read State of Fear?
I don’t really recommend it.
Is that the climate change denial one?
Yes.
Is that when the T-rex brings Dr. Ellie Sattler to a quivering orgasm?
Wow, it’s been near 30 years since I read that. The thing I remember most distinctly is how different the lawyer was between the book and movie.
I think Nedry’s death in the book is that for me. The movie version is practically G-rated compared to how it went down in the novel.
First time I ever had to think about the possibility of what would happen with a sizable belly slash.
Never going to un-imagine it.
It was so visceral in the book. I remember watching the movie thinking “oh its about to happen”, then it’s basically off camera.
I only read the book as an adult on vacation. Thing that stood out to me was the very first scene and going “Oh! Yeah, probably good they didn’t put that in the movie.”
Despite posting a photo of the book in my hand, I haven’t read it for a good minute. You’re referring to the clinic scene? (I think that’s first in the book, but not 100%).
